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Artist Profile: Peter Feigenbaum

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:28:29 +0000

Trainset Ghetto is voyeurism more than it is hobbyism. It is the physical byproduct of teenage suburban daydreams and attempts to live vicariously through an alien post-urban 1980s landscape that was in no way part of my quotidian existence-a landscape that I caught glimpses of through car rides down the Bruckner Expressway, Henry Chalfant’s photographs, and movies such as “The French Connection” and “Style Wars”. But this odd juxtaposition of lifestyles is a well-hidden text. I make few overt attempts to exploit this perverse juxtaposition of place and social circumstance in my photographs. Rather, the primary emphasis is always “setting the scene” in a hyper-real, trompe l’oeil manner. Unlike other “scene-setting” photographers like James Casebere, who works with hazy spatial ambiance, or Gregory Crewdson, who creates uncanny cinematic narratives, Trainset Ghetto is concerned primarily with hyper-realism via an attention to small mundane details of the urban architectural vernacular.

Trainset Ghetto is a by-product of the virtual urban spatial realms that defined my teenage experience in the 1990s-virtual realms found in video games ranging from Sim City to Duke Nuke ‘Em to Grand Theft Auto. The motivation to create Trainset Ghetto was cultivated by experiences in these virtual realms. Additionally, there was a desire to objectify these spatial experiences-a desire that could only be fulfilled via miniaturization, a process in which inhabitable spaces become tangible objects. While artists such as Corey Arcangel have responded to the digital realm of the 1990s using similarly digital means, Trainset Ghetto uses anachronistic, analogue means–the age-old pseudo-craft of model railroading.

Trainset Ghetto is not simply a “cheap holiday in other people’s misery”– it is a rigorous examination of the urban architectural vernacular. And it is more than a simple replication; it is an attempt to understand the metaphysics of place within an urban context.

The urban fabric and vernacular architecture of New York is both perpetually familiar and perpetually unfamiliar. Thus my scenes attempt to exploit this ambiguity of place-the feeling of remembering a place that one has never actually visited.

Accordingly, the scenes depicted in my photographs and models have never existed in reality, rather they were informed by vague memories (both real and “cinematically” implanted) of experiences in various parts of New York City. Perhaps the most important components of this vernacular include rooftop water tanks, 25-foot-wide five-story walkups, Italianate cornices, ancient brick facades painted Pepto-Bismol pink, roll-up store-front grates, parapet graffiti, and garish plastic storefront awnings. All of these details I have studied and re-created in miniature with great care.

Thus, Trainset Ghetto achieves hyper-reality, which Jean Baudrillard describes as a simulation of something that never actually existed. The project could also be seen as a perverse parallel to the other great American architectural hyper-reality: Disneyland. From a stock of nearly fifty buildings created both from scratch and from model railroad structure kits. I can compose an endless array of believable scenes that are brilliantly generic, and almost capable of implanting false memories of my 1970s childhood in the bombed-out Bronx that never happened.
http://www.peterfeigenbaum.com/

Malin Abrahamsson

Mike — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:04:32 +0000

“De/Con/Struct”
2009
Mixed media on canvas
24″ x 36″

“Pile of Homes”
2009
Mixed media
4′ x 5′ x 4′

“The New”
2008
Mixed media on canvas
36″ x 48″

Artist Statement
What appears simple just demands a different kind of patience than what is scraggly and complex.

Website
http://malinabrahamsson.com

Megan Berk

Mike — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:44:55 +0000

Palm Springs 6, acrylic and aquarelle on panel, 34×60

Palm Springs 5, acrylic and aquarelle on panel, 34×48

Retreat, acrylic and aquarelle on panel, 34×28

Artist Statement

My recent work investigates the shadows of the American middle-class landscape. I locate surface qualities that both seduce and haunt, simultaneously evoking my own middle-class desires and a recognition of the feebleness of those desires: things coming and going. A vantage point. Translating those surface qualities becomes a way to work through the tensions within my creative life; I want both beauty and grit, just as, perhaps, I want aspects of the suburban dream as well as the right to criticize it.

By following the areas of seduction- palm trees against a pink sky, the sweep of a smooth concrete driveway– the contradictions of suburban desires present themselves. The darker, less-defined areas mark an entrance into the real domestic life of the place. Ideas and longings flicker and disappear. A walkway leading to a house, possibly a home, is barely visible in the darkness of night – or obscured by memory itself. The empty spaces hold something.

Contact

www.meganberk.com
meganberk@hotmail.com

Maddy Rosenberg

Mike — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:19:42 +0000

Berlin Faces (triptych)
2008, oil on panel, 40 x 22 inches

Book of Days
2008, oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches

Wood, Stone, Bone
2004-5, oil on panel, four 1 x 10 inch panels

Artist Statement

My work has been greatly influenced by urban environments. I respond to the architecture of a place as it bears its own history, of its time and place when constructed. A building is also the witness of subsequent periods from those who have lived their lives within to those who have briefly passed through its walls. For me, though inorganic, buildings contain remnants of a human touch.

Though based in New York City, I also gather much of my imagery from my travels. In fact, bits and pieces of places I have seen are deconstructed and reconfigured in seamlessly assembled compositions. Objects, images, architectural details are placed within a newly invented context, as I seek to transform even the mundane into the strange and intriguing.

The juxtaposition of flat planes of saturated color with these finely painted details more clearly defines the abstract nature of the paintings while simultaneously emphasizing the evocativeness of the imagery. The trompe I’oeil images become more than mere depictions of reality, with the shapes of pure color a reminder of the identity of the painted surface.

I have been dealing with the ideas of multi-panels for a number of years. With its sequential aspect, spaces fluctuate between the surface and glimpses behind it. Ambiguity is further created through unusual combinations of perspectives, mixtures of light sources, and unsettling color choices. By using the relatively small scale, I can draw the viewer into a minute representation of a world that offers reality with a twist. This invites an intimate, thought provoking relationship between participant and the work. It is an immersion in spaces that are uninhabited, uninhabitable, a discovery of the unexpected. One’s sense of order and proportion is challenged, as the implied presence of human life coupled with the subtly disturbing images evokes an uneasy response and re-evaluation in the viewer, who begins to realize that things are not what they seem.

Website

http://www.maddyrosenberg.net/

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